While bilateral talks remain a non-starter, JuD chief Hafiz Saeed, the man who could trigger the next India-Pakistan war, keeps bolstering his terror infrastructure under the benign gaze of 'state actors'

The midday buzz in Lahore's Qudsia mosque dissolves into pin-drop silence when Maulana Hafiz Saeed, alleged mastermind of the November 26, 2008, attack on Mumbai, rises to deliver his Friday sermon. Clad in his trademark white salwar kurta that rises above his ankles, the preacher supports his portly frame on a four-foot-long knobbed wooden stick, a constant reminder of a recent spinal ailment. The frailty is an illusion. "Kashmiri sisters and brothers need you. Get up and join us to take the bull by the horns," Saeed roars into the microphones in chaste Urdu. "Are you listening to me? Why don't you hear the screams of our Kashmiri sisters and mothers? It is time to act. Join us to wage jihad against India," the Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD) Amir's high-pitched voice reverberates around the green-hued main hall.

A sea of white salwar kurtas, nearly 2,000 young people who have streamed in from across the country, respond by silently raising their hands.

Today is special. It is Pakistan's 68th Independence Day. But the target of Saeed's fury is across the international border, 24 km away. A border which, Saeed promises, will soon be erased. "Ghazwa-e-Hind is inevitable," Saeed thunders, predicting an apocalyptic battle that will vanquish India. He shifts the stick from his hands and drives it into the wooden stage like a stake. "Kashmir can be freed through an armed struggle only? 1971 will be avenged only if you join us in jihad against India, the U.S. and Israel."

Six refrigerator-sized tower air-conditioners pump cool air to sharply reduce the oppressive humid heat outside. Saeed is a man with Pakistan's biggest reward-the US State Department put out a $10 million (Rs 66 crore) bounty for information leading to his arrest in 2012. Exactly who would arrest him is possibly a thought that crosses his mind often. The provincial police provide him security wherever he goes. He rides in a convoy of sleek white bullet- and bomb-proof Land Cruisers, what would pass for Z-plus security in India. One of the vehicles has a jammer-antennae that disrupt radio signals that could trigger bombs planted by would-be assassins. He is guarded round-the-clock by a phalanx of 24 fierce-looking bodyguards in brown salwar suits. "India cannot even touch my feet," he smiles when asked if he fears an Abbottabad-style raid (see interview). Bollywood director Kabir Khan is perhaps the closest an Indian has come to unnerving him. On August 10, Saeed petitioned the Lahore High Court for a ban on the Khan-directed vengeance-fantasy Bollywood film Phantom where an actor playing him is killed onscreen. The film, Saeed said through his lawyer, defamed the JuD and Pakistan.

Meanwhile, clinching evidence, collected from Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terror strikes in Gurdaspur on July 27 and Udhampur on August 5 this year, formed part of the dossiers that India's National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval was to hand over to his Pakistani counterpart Sartaj Aziz. The NSA-level talks scheduled for August 24 in New Delhi were aborted two days prior to it after Pakistan pulled out citing "India imposing pre-conditions".

Besides evidence of Dawood Ibrahim's whereabouts in Karachi, the dossier included the interrogation report of Mohammed Naved Yakub, the Pakistani terrorist caught in Udhampur after attacking a Border Security Force (BSF) convoy. Naved revealed he was 'launched' from Halan in Pakistan by Hafiz Saeed's son Talha for a major fidayeen strike in Jammu and Kashmir.

The infrastructure of terror

When India talks of terror being on top of the agenda with Pakistan, it usually means the activities of the LeT. The "infrastructure of terror", another recurring theme in India's diplomatic missives to Pakistan, refers to the LeT's training camps active in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Pakistan's Punjab province.

The July 10 joint declaration by Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif in Ufa agreed to "discuss terrorism in all its forms" precisely because non-state actors such as the LeT can wreck the dialogue.

With the exception of the December 2001 attack on India's Parliament carried out by the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a majority of the sensational terror strikes on mainland India have been the LeT's handiwork.

"The LeT is the most potent terror threat that we have to face and is likely to be the source of any future attack," says a senior home ministry official.

A 2014 paper by Surinder Kumar Sharma and Anshuman Behera of the New Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA) says the LeT is dangerous because its operational reach and capability is transnational and it continues to enjoy the patronage of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan Army and Saudi Arabia.

Much to New Delhi's dismay, the LeT has weathered every storm. Right from the US designating it a terrorist organisation in 2001-after which it renamed itself the JuD-and squeezing its funding. The LeT was unaffected by the nationwide crackdown on militant groups following the December 16, 2014 massacre of 132 schoolchildren in Peshawar by Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants. An August 24 notification published in newspapers by the National Crisis Management Cell of Pakistan's Ministry of Interior listed 61 terrorist organisations. Sixty of them, including the JeM, the TTP and the LeT had been banned. Only one group, the JuD, was "under observation".

This status is unlikely to change, India's National Investigation Agency (NIA) officials say. The LeT is a veritable arm of the Pakistani deep state-the ISI. In 2010, arrested LeT operative David Coleman Headley told NIA officials in the US that every LeT leader, even Hafiz Saeed, had an ISI handler, to ensure the Pakistan Army retained control over the group.

Unlike non-state actors such as the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) which assassinated Punjab (Pakistan) home minister Shuja Khanzada on August 16 in revenge for their chief Malik Ishaq's 'encounter' killing, the LeT has never turned on the Pakistani state.

An Indian intelligence analyst says the LeT today is far bigger than a ragged non-state actor being reared by the deep state. "The LeT is a three-dimensional politico-religious outfit with its own armed wing, a 'Sunni Hezbollah'," he says, comparing it to Lebanon's powerful Iran-backed Shia insurgent group.

JuD social media sites overflow with propaganda about its volunteers administering aid during natural disasters. A JuD spokesperson says their medical wing has a 188-ambulance fleet along with dozens of blood banks set up across Pakistan. The group provides monthly provisions and cash donations to more than 40,000 orphans and widows. Widows are given job opportunities, orphans are given free education. This charity, Indian officials say, hides a not-so-unknown fact. The LeT continues to run 14 terrorist training camps in PoK and Punjab. Youths are vacuumed from the poorer regions of Pakistan's provinces and run through three-month military-style training courses and injected across the border for attacks on India. The latest, Mohammed Naved Yakub, 21, a resident of Faisalabad, Pakistan, was arrested by security forces in Jammu's Udhampur district on August 5 after attacking a bus carrying BSF personnel. Pakistan's foreign office denied he is a Pakistani national.

LeT fighters make up a majority of the 70-odd foreign militants, mostly of Pakistani origin, still active in Jammu and Kashmir. There are an estimated 200 militants still active, majority of them of Kashmiri origin. Only the LeT, however, retains the ability to divert its fighters to attacks elsewhere in India. The 10 terrorists who attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008, in which 166 people were killed, were originally trained for fighting in Kashmir.

Captured militants have revealed that the camps are now shrinking from the heyday of the 1990s where hundreds of militants were trained. They are now smaller and host smaller batches of less than 50 recruits. But there is no mistaking the lethality of their graduates.

Three suspected LeT terrorists attacked a bus, planted explosives on a railway track and finally stormed a police station in Gurdaspur, Punjab, on July 27, before being gunned down.

Ujjwal Nikam, special public prosector in the 26/11 trial, has no hesitation in calling Saeed the mastermind of the plot. Three accused in the case-Ajmal Kasab, the lone terrorist who was captured alive in the 26/11 attack, plotters Abu Jundal and Headley named Saeed as the LeT supremo. "Kasab told us that Saeed visited camps where he was trained with the other attackers and gave them motivational lectures," says Nikam. Pakistan's response has been that there has been no evidence directly linking Saeed to the attack. It, instead, arrested the military commander Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi and six others in 2008. Seven years later, the 26/11 trial in Pakistan is yet to begin, another irritant in India-Pakistan ties. On April 10, Lakhvi was released on bail after a seven-year prison spell in Lahore's Adiala jail.

The recruitment machine

Hafiz Saeed's fiery Friday sermons with their fist-waving, India-hating invectives are a staple in Lahore. Almost as common as the bustling jummah markets outside. But it is what happens after he has finished speaking that is interesting.

Saeed's audience of youngsters file out of the hall and make their way outside, past a library selling jihadi literature, cheap CDs with Saeed's speeches, Islamic books and T-shirts inscribed with 'India ka jo yaar hai, gaddar hai, gaddar hai (A friend of India is a traitor)'and 'Jihad is my life'. They approach three JuD volunteers sitting behind small tables. The youths queue up to pen down names, addresses, contact numbers and educational qualifications on bulky registers the size of coffee tables. It is the closest to a JuD employment exchange. One of the young men in the queue is Ismael Khan, 21, a bearded, lanky six-footer, heavily built with sallow cheeks. He wears his trousers high above his ankles in the style of devout Muslims. Saeed's speech has had an impact on the physics-mathematics graduate from the government college in Khairpur. Ismael Khan says he wants to join JuD to play his part to "free his Kashmiri brothers and sisters from India". He will not say how. "I've travelled 1,300 km to reach Lahore only to offer my services to JuD. Wish me luck please," says the youngster from a lower-middle-class Sindhi family.

Ismael Khan and 70 other youngsters were bundled into a minibus hired by a local JuD leader in Sindh's Khairpur district.

Khan's journey up the A8 motorway is testimony to Hafiz Saeed's draw among Pakistan's middle and lower classes, a third of the country's population. This is also the catchment area for the LeT which has over two decades sent militants into Jammu and Kashmir and more recently mounted attacks on Mumbai and Gurdaspur. There are whispers that the JuD evaluates each recruit who has signed up and assesses where they will be most suited-charity work in Pakistan or in the rugged training camps of Muzaffarabad where they will be 'launched' against India.

A senior Pakistani government official believes recruits do not stay with the banned outfit for life. "Most young recruits join under influence of Hafiz Saeed," he admits. "They do not join it for a career in terrorism. They join it motivated in equal part by religious conviction, a desire for adventure and a sense of purpose. Most recruits leave after two years of fighting across the border to return home," says an official source.

Saeed feigns ignorance when asked about his organisation's armed wing. The LeT, according to him, is an organisation fighting for the liberation of Kashmir. But strangely for a humanitarian charity doing social work, the JuD's flag features a black scimitar set above six black pillars. There are only five pillars of Islam. The sixth, is a recurring theme in all of Saeed's speeches: Jihad or Holy War.

Pakistan froze JuD's assets and accounts following a UN Security Council resolution in 2011. Neither did this nor the US actions, affect the group's financial position. The JuD and its affiliated charitable organisations expanded their reach within Pakistan. "The group raises funds through charity. A major portion of funds came from donations by Pakistanis working abroad," says Asad Rana, a Lahore-based security analyst.

The JuD runs 140 schools in Pakistan which offer free education, boarding, lodging and a modest monthly stipend. It has established state-of-the-art hospitals in Muridke, Balakot, Mansehra, Muzaffarabad, Lahore, Gujranwala, Karachi and Hyderabad, equipped with the latest medical equipment. JuD-run hospitals offer free liver transplant and eye laser surgery. The group has plans to build a cancer hospital.

Handling the LeT

An option to covertly target the LeT leadership, not unlike that suggested in the Bollywood movie Phantom, was briefly discussed but swiftly abandoned by Indian security agencies after the 26/11 Mumbai attack. Since then, India's thrust against the LeT-JuD combo has been diplomatic and legal.

A three-pronged strategy to mount international pressure and put the spotlight on the terrorist groups in Pakistan, get it to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack to justice and get the civilian establishment to curtail the use of terror as a strategic weapon, has been underway since 2008.

This move has met with mixed success. The US has, over the years, put pressure by squeezing the LeT's finances and designating its affiliates as terrorist organisations. Last year, it designated two of its key fundraisers, Nazir Ahmad Chaudhry and Muhammad Hussein Gill, as Specially Designated Global Terrorists.

"We will continue to target LeT's financial foundation to impede its violent activities," said US Under Secretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen in Washington in June 2014.

In June this year, India approached the United Nations Security Council's 1267 committee-which requires all states to take action against individuals or entities associated with the al Qaeda-to question Pakistan on the release of Lakhvi. The matter came before the committee but was placed on "technical hold" by China.

Former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, G. Parthasarathy, calls for measures that would make it difficult for Saeed to move about freely, preaching hatred. "He must be forced into hiding, like the indicted criminal Dawood Ibrahim. That will have a psychological impact on him and his followers," he says.

India pulled off a minor diplomatic coup during PM Modi's recent two-day state visit to the UAE. A joint statement issued by India and the UAE on August 16 triggered consternation within Pakistan. In the joint statement, which all but named Pakistan, both sides agreed to "denounce and oppose terrorism in all forms and manifestations, wherever committed and by whomever, calling on all states to reject and abandon the use of terrorism against other countries, dismantle terrorism infrastructures where they exist, and bring perpetrators of terrorism to justice." It has set the pitch for Pakistan's isolation from one country belonging to the influential Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) at least on the issue of terrorism. "It is the NDA government's biggest step to isolate Pakistan internationally on the issue of terrorism," says BJP leader Seshadri Chari.

Clearly, it will take more than diplomacy to deter Hafiz Saeed and his non-state actors.

With inputs from Kaswar Klasra in Lahore.

Follow the writers on Twitter @KaswarKlasra and @SandeepUnnithan

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